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Much of the literature on affirmative action is normative. Further, in scholarship that takes an empirical approach to examine this topic, the object of inquiry is typically the ramifications of such provisions – most notably the extent to which they foster social transformation. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the antecedents of affirmative action. This work examines what variables systematically predict affirmative action. We focus on the policy feedback literature and compensatory justice frameworks to examine the effects of democracy, modernisation and globalisation on affirmative action programmes. Time-series cross-sectional analyses of data for hundreds of groups from all over the globe for the period 1985–2003 confirm our hypotheses. This is the first work to examine affirmative action programmes in a large-N framework of such scale. We find that such programmes systematically correlate with democracy, modernisation and globalisation.

How does political trust affect the competing pressures of policy versus political performance in emergent democracies? Studies suggest that political trust buffers against these pressures, but empirical evidence is lacking in regard to if or how, given the focus in the literature on mature democracies where democratic institutions and practices are unlikely to be upended by either policy or political underperformance. However, in emergent democracies where the risks of democratic reversal loom large, the distinction is highly relevant. This article investigates how political trust matters in emergent democracies, specifically, if political trust buffers against public pressures, and whether it is system-directed versus incumbent-directed, for East and Southeast Asia. The evidence from multiple waves of survey data provides three useful insights: first, it shows that political trust supersedes economic expectations in support for the democratising system; this supports political trust as a buffer for the political system and is system-directed. Second, political trust goes hand-in-hand with economic performance to explain support for the incumbent government. This finding clarifies that political trust does not buffer the government against public pressure for performance. Third, taken together, the results show that economic growth may keep a government in office but institution-building leads to political trust that undergirds the political system, so that institution-building is a priority for stability in emergent democracies. These results expand the political trust literature to underpin democratic progression and consolidation issues that are unique to emergent democracies.

Although policy entrepreneurs are assigned an important role in crossing policy boundaries and addressing complex problems, our understanding of the process is limited. This article systematically reviews 51 studies on conditions, strategies and implications of crossboundary entrepreneurship. Findings show that (1) the literature predominantly mentions issue promotion and coalition-building as crossboundary strategies; (2) vertical boundary-crossing is discussed more frequently than horizontal boundary-crossing; (3) the most reported boundary-crossing function is to expand issue arenas; (4) conditions that enable crossboundary strategies include institutional overlap, issue interpretation, power vacuum, overruling policies and lacking resources; and (5) implications of entrepreneurship include raised opposition, increased competition over leadership, augmented complexity hindering collective action, raised costs and resources, and issues regarding trust, legitimacy and authority. Policy entrepreneurship allows for micro-level insights in the emergence of crossboundary processes. We suggest future research to focus on causal processes between conditions, strategies and implications to better understand their interplay.

As collaborative governance processes continue to grow in popularity, practitioners and policy scholars alike can benefit from the development of methods to better analyse and evaluate them. This article develops one such method by demonstrating how collaborative governance theory can be integrated with the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to better explain coalition dynamics, policy-oriented learning and policy change in collaborative contexts. I offer three theoretical propositions that suggest alternate relationships among ACF variables under collaborative governance arrangements and illustrate these propositions using interview data from an original case study of a collaborative governance process in Colorado, USA. The integration of collaborative governance theory with the ACF improves its application in collaborative contexts and provides new theoretical insights into the study and practice of collaborative governance.

Given pervasive gridlock at the national level, state legislatures are increasingly the place where notable policy change occurs. Investigating such change is difficult because it is often hard to characterise policy change and use observable data to evaluate theoretical predictions; it is subsequently unclear whether law-making explanations focusing on the US Congress also apply to state legislatures. We use several measures of state policy outcomes to examine lawmaking in state legislatures across nearly two decades, and we argue for using simulation studies to connect theoretical predictions to empirical specifications and help interpret the theoretical relevance of estimated correlations. Doing so reveals that the observed law-making outcomes we study are most consistent with law-making models emphasising the importance of the chamber median and the powers of the governor rather than those that focus on the preferences of the majority party.

We examine state-level variation in the flow of benefits under the largest Social Security programme – the Old-Age (OA) programme. OA pensions remain a robust and growing component of the American social safety net. Although OA pensions are entirely administered by the federal government, state-level demographic features can imply different aggregate levels of programme expenditures across states. We describe high levels of variation in the resources flowing into states from the OA programme and we find relationships between state features that might seem only remotely related to income support for the elderly: current unemployment rates, previous income levels, poverty rates and minority populations. We find a particularly strong link between current unemployment rates, OA coverage and OA average benefits. The number of recipients and the level of average OA payments increase when unemployment increases. This is a poorly understood but important feature of the OA programme.

What explains national preferences concerning international and regional financial regulation? This article focusses on one of the main financial jurisdictions worldwide, the United Kingdom (UK). It is puzzling that since the crisis this jurisdiction has pursued stringent harmonised regulation in certain areas (banking), but not others (capital markets). We explain this in terms of how the demands of powerful economic interests are mediated by the political process and regulatory institutions. In banking, there was strong political pressure to restore financial stability, and regulatory institutions were significantly strengthened. This enabled UK regulators to resist industry lobbying and pursue more stringent harmonised rules at the international and European Union levels (“trading up”). In the case of capital markets, by contrast, UK regulators lacked political support for tougher regulation and were institutionally much weaker. As a result, the industry was far more effective in shaping UK preferences aimed at protecting the sector’s competitiveness (“trading down”).

Although elected officials have the final say over pensions, boards of trustees also influence plan governance. Not a great deal is known about boards or how they shape policies. Boards are composed of politically and nonpolitically appointed members, as well as active and retired employees. Plan active-employee size turns out to be the best predictor of membership, suggesting that employee voice expands as plans cover more workers. Using both fixed effects and instrumental variables approaches, I show how boards shape plans’ policies and funded levels. Active and retired members shape discount rates, whereas active membership is positively associated with funded ratios. Interestingly, gridlock is also associated with higher discount rates. However, I find that plans’ actual investment returns are poor predictors of expected returns, irrespective of board composition. Although boards offer a venue through which states can manage funds, they are not suited to solving pensions’ governance challenges alone.

The EU infrastructure policy has relied on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) as a means to successfully deliver infrastructure of benefit for the EU. To reach its infrastructure policy objectives, the EU has implemented support mechanisms aimed at facilitating the delivery of PPPs. This article is aimed at evaluating to what extent these mechanisms have actually contributed to improving the economic performance of PPPs. To that end, we have selected the case of Spanish road PPPs for empirical analysis. The main result shows that EU support positively influences the economic performance of PPP projects. This is caused by the fact that the EU conditions its financial support on a project’s meeting a set of requirements that help assure the success of the project. From this result, we obtain a set of conclusions that may be generalised to other cases, and provide a contribution to the body of knowledge on PPPs.

The Pivotal Politics model (Krehbiel) has significantly influenced the study of American politics, but its core empirical prediction – that the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to legislative productivity – has not found strong empirical support. We argue that previous research featured a disconnect between the exclusively ideological theory and tests that relied on outcome variables that were not purely ideological. We remedy this by dividing landmark laws (Mayhew) into two counts – those that invoke ideological preferences and those that do not – and uncover results consistent with Pivotal Politics’ core prediction: the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to the production of ideological legislation. We also find that the size of the gridlock zone is positively related to the production of nonideological legislation. These results hold up in the face of various sensitivity analyses and robustness checks. We further show that Pivotal Politics explains variation in ideological legislation better than alternative theories based on partisan agenda control.

Rulemaking gives agencies significant power to change public policy, but agencies do not exercise this power in a vacuum. The separation of powers system practically guarantees that, at times, agencies will be pushed and pulled in different directions by Congress and the president. We argue that these forces critically affect the volume of rules produced by an agency. We develop an account of agency rulemaking in light of these factors and test our hypotheses on a data set of agency rules from 1995 to 2007. Our results show that even after accounting for factors specific to each agency, agencies do, in fact, adjust the quantity of rules they produce in response to separation of powers oversight. Further analysis shows that the president’s influence is limited to those agencies that he has made a priority.

California and Washington recently replaced traditional partisan elections with nonpartisan “top-two” election procedures. Some reform advocates hoped that voters would behave in a way to support moderate candidates in the primary stage; the limited evidence for this behaviour has led some scholars to conclude that the reform has little chance to change meaningful policy outcomes. Yet we find that the nonpartisan procedure has predictable and disparate political consequences: the general elections between two candidates of the same party, called copartisan general elections, tend to occur in districts without any meaningful crossparty competition. Furthermore, copartisan elections are more likely to occur with open seats, when a new legislator will begin building a network of relationships. The results, viewed through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, suggest that opportunities exist for coalitional rearrangement over time.

A country is on the carbon efficiency frontier if its per-capita emissions of CO2 are at least as low as any state that was at least as economically developed at a period when technology was no more advanced. Building on earlier work employing Data Envelopment Analysis to benchmark performance, we argue that a useful measure of whether a state adopts “good practice” in relation to climate change is how near it is to this frontier. We calculate efficiency scores for a sample of developed countries between 1994 and 2011, and model the impact of green taxation, next to a series of political and economic controls, on performance. We find that higher levels of environmental tax revenue are positively and significantly associated with higher carbon efficiency. The central contributions of this research are the introduction of an innovative measure for environmental quality and assessing how this is driven by green taxation.

Theories of public policy change, despite their differences, converge on one point of strong agreement: the relationship between policy and its causes can and does change over time. This consensus yields numerous empirical implications, but our standard analytical tools are inadequate for testing them. As a result, the dynamic and transformative relationships predicted by policy theories have been left largely unexplored in time series analysis of public policy. This article introduces dynamic linear modelling (DLM) as a useful statistical tool for exploring time-varying relationships in public policy. The article offers a detailed exposition of the DLM approach and illustrates its usefulness with a time series analysis of United States defense policy from 1957 to 2010. The results point the way for a new attention to dynamics in the policy process, and the article concludes with a discussion of how this research programme can profit from applying DLMs.

We examine whether intra-EU migration affects welfare chauvinistic attitudes, i.e. the idea that immigrants’ access to the welfare system should be restricted. According to the in-group/out-group theory, migration can unleash feelings of insecurity and thus trigger welfare chauvinism. According to intergroup contact theory, welfare chauvinism should decrease when immigration is higher, because contact reduces prejudice and softens anti-immigrant stances. We test these theories using data from the European Social Survey 2008/2009, supplemented with country-level data, and analyse these data using a multilevel ordered logit approach. We find a negative relation between intra-EU immigration and welfare chauvinism, supporting the intergroup contact theory: in countries with more intra-EU migration, welfare chauvinism tends to be lower. Furthermore, the higher the percentage of East European immigrants compared to other EU immigrants, the higher the level of welfare chauvinism.

Political corruption in the land sector is pervasive, but difficult to document and effectively prosecute. This article provides new evidence on political land corruption in Malta, the European Union’s smallest member state and one of the world’s most densely populated countries. It shows how the country’s highly restrictive zoning laws, along with a de jure independent regulator, have created opportunities for extensive and endemic corruption in the granting of land development permits in zones that are outside development. It provides an example of governments creating institutions as rent-collection instruments – not to correct market failures, but to create opportunities for corruption. The unique underlying data set was collected through an automated web-scraping program as the regulator first turned down then ignored freedom of information requests for the data.

Prominent public policy models have hypothesised that rising income inequality will lead to more redistributive spending. Subsequent theoretical advancements and empirical research often failed to find a positive relationship between inequality and redistributive spending, however. Over the last few decades both income inequality and redistributive spending have been growing in the United States states. In this work, we consider whether temporal variation in inequality can explain variation in redistributive spending, while controlling for a number of factors that covary with redistributive spending in the states. In an analysis of data for 1976–2008, we find that higher levels of inequality are associated with greater redistributive spending, offering empirical evidence that fiscal policy at the state level responds to growing levels of income inequality. Considering the growing role of state governments in welfare provision during the past several decades, this finding is relevant for policy researchers and practitioners at all levels of government.

This article tackles the question of how bureaucratic structures condition frontline implementers’ use of European Union (EU) migration law. Adopting an organisational perspective, the study expects that only under discretion do implementers draw independently on original EU law. Empirically, the article draws on qualitative interviews with migration law implementers in the Netherlands and the German Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia. The analysis reveals that in the nondiscretionary Dutch structure, frontline implementers only rely on EU law when receiving instructions from higher administrative levels. The use of EU law is more diverse in the German discretionary structure. Under legal tension, several German frontline implementers use EU law parallel to national law. However, not all German respondents feel comfortable in interpreting original EU law and jurisprudence. Although structural discretion conditions uses of EU law, the variation of the German case suggests that microlevel factors complement explanations for frontline uses of EU law.

Cross-border commercial activity raises issues in federations where multiple jurisdictions can claim the right to tax the same income. In the United States, this coordination problem is resolved by splitting the tax base according to the geographic distribution of firms’ sales, capital and labour. The weight of each factor is determined on a state-by-state basis, which opens room for competitive legislative behaviour. In this complex issue area, however, policymakers must invest lot of resources to monitor competitors, evaluate policy alternatives and shepherd tax reform through the legislative process. This implies that highly professional legislatures should be more responsive to the policies of nearby states. We consider data on most American states over the period from 1986 to 2013 and find strong evidence of conditional spatial dependence. Our findings suggest that policy diffusion may often be moderated by institutional and political factors.

European energy security has recently emerged as an important topic of scholarly attention. Many studies have scrutinised the political and institutional innovations triggered by the establishment of the European Union internal energy market and external energy policy. However, the literature indicates a particularly striking gap between growing research and concept development, and only recently have efforts been made to analyse this current dynamic more accurately. By focussing on the security of gas supply and liquefied natural gas development in France, Italy and Spain, and extending the model of the catalytic state to the energy-security realm, this article contributes to the empirical and conceptual debate. In particular, the article argues that the catalytic state model, which emphasises the active role of governments in a liberalised market structure and their wide participation in a networked pattern of energy diplomacy, is better equipped than the regulatory state model to capture the new European politics of energy security.